What Type of Social Media User Are You?
How you use them may matter more than how long
The argument about whether social media is good or bad for people has been going on for fifteen years and keeps producing weak and contradictory results. One reason is that time spent is a terrible measure: an hour spent writing to three friends and an hour spent reading strangers are the same number and completely different activities. The distinction researchers reached for instead is between doing things with people and simply watching - and while it has since come in for serious criticism, it is still the most useful way to look at your own hour.
Before you start There are no right answers. Pick what is usually true for you, not what sounds best.
Answer about a normal week. If you do not use social media at all, the honest answer to most of these is the bottom option, and that is a perfectly good result.
What it measures
Three ways of being on the same platforms. Watching is consuming without leaving a trace. Talking is direct exchange with specific people. Posting is putting things out to an audience. Most people do all three and almost nobody has the balance they think they have.
Based on: Active and passive social media use (Verduyn et al., 2017)
Possible results
Watching
Consuming without leaving a trace.
Talking
Direct exchange with specific people.
Posting
Putting things out to an audience.
Common questions
Is social media bad for you?
After fifteen years of studies the honest summary is that the average effect is small and depends heavily on who and how. That is a less satisfying answer than either side of the public argument offers, and it is the one the evidence supports. What is reasonably consistent is that time spent is the wrong question, and that the same hour arranged differently is a different hour - which is why this test asks about shape rather than duration.
Why does scrolling leave me feeling worse?
The explanation with the most support is comparison: a feed is hundreds of edited moments in a row, and the thing you are comparing them against is your own unedited hour. But two honest qualifications belong here. The effect is small on average, and the causal direction is not settled - a low mood is one of the most reliable predictors of opening the app in the first place, which means at least part of what feels like cause is probably consequence.
Should I delete the apps?
That is a bigger lever than the evidence calls for in most cases, and it removes the second bar along with the first. If the watching bar is your high one, the smaller changes are the ones worth trying first: unfollowing the accounts that are purely comparison fuel, keeping the app off the first screen, and making a habit of replying to somebody rather than reading past them. If none of that shifts anything after a few weeks, then a longer break is a reasonable experiment - and treat it as an experiment, since the honest state of the research does not justify treating it as a cure.
Sources
- Verduyn, P., Ybarra, O., Résibois, M., Jonides, J., & Kross, E. (2017). Do social network sites enhance or undermine subjective well-being? A critical review. Social Issues and Policy Review.
- Valkenburg, P. M., van Driel, I. I., & Beyens, I. (2022). The associations of active and passive social media use with well-being: A critical scoping review. New Media & Society.
An honest note This one needs a bigger caveat than most, because the framework it uses is genuinely contested. The active-passive distinction became influential quickly and has since been challenged hard: later reviews have argued that the evidence for passive use harming wellbeing is much weaker than the popular version suggests, that effects where they exist are very small, and that self-reported passive use is a poor measure of what people actually did. There is also a direction problem that nothing has resolved - feeling low makes people scroll more, as well as scrolling possibly making people feel low. So read the bars as a description of your habits, not as a diagnosis of what those habits are doing to you. The practical suggestion here survives the criticism better than the theory does: replacing some watching with talking to someone specific is a reasonable thing to try regardless of which side of the argument turns out to be right.